Newsletter 2019

Membership

The ACL membership continues to grow rapidly in 2019. I am happy to announce that we have over 5000 members by the end of 2019! You can now renew your membership through the ACL portal: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/ or you can renew when you register for an ACL affiliated conference.

Outgoing Exec Members

The following people are leaving the exec:

• Marti Hearst (ACL VP-elect (2016), VP (2017), President (2018), Past President (2019))
• Jennifer Foster (ACL Member at-large, 2017-2019)
• Julia Hockenmaier (NAACL Chair, 2018-2019)

I would like to thank all of you for your hard work as members of the exec and wish you luck in your future endeavors!

New Exec Members

We have three new members joining the exec as of January 1, 2020. These are:

• Tim Baldwin (ACL VP-elect)
• Anna Korhonen (ACL member at-large)
• Colin Cherry (NAACL Chair)

Welcome to Tim, Anna, and Colin!

The full list of Exec members is here: http://www.aclweb.org/portal/about

The next elections will take place in the Fall.

TACL Journal: New Editor-in-Chief

ACL has appointed Ani Nenkova, of University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA, the new Co-Editor-in-Chief of TACL (https://www.transacl.org). Her term starts July 1, 2019 and runs for three years. She is replacing Lillian Lee, whose term expires at the end of 2019, and joining Brian Roark and Mark Johnson, who continue to serve as TACL EiCs.

Ido Dagan has resigned as the chair of the TACL Steering Committee. ACL has appointed Jan Hajic, a member of the TACL Steering Committee, to Chair the Steering Committee and also to chair the TACL EiC Search Committee.

Publicity Director

ACL set up a new position of Publicity Director, which is one of the ad hoc ACL leadership roles. The Publicity Director will take the lead on developing a social media strategy for the ACL, with a focus on publicizing ACL members’ research and accomplishments. We are happy to announce the ACL Publicity Director and Deputy Director:

• Director: Barbara Plank (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
• Deputy Director: Sarvnaz Karimi (CSIRO, Australia)

Their term starts from the date of announcement, through December 31, 2022.

ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

The winner of the ACL 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award (LTA) was Dr. Ron Kaplan.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/announcement-2019-acl-lifetime-achievement-award-lta

The 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced during ACL 2020 in Seattle.

For a list of past winners, visit: https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award_Recipients

ACL Distinguished Service Award

2019 is the first year that the Distinguished Service Award (DSA) was awarded. The 2019 winner of the Distinguished Service Award is Min-Yen Kan, for his dedicated and sustained work on the ACL Anthology.

https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/announcement-2019-acl-distinguished-service-award-dsa

The 2020 Distinguished Service Award will be announced during ACL 2020 in Seattle.

ACL Test-of-Time Awards

2019 is the first year that the ACL Test-of-Time (ToT) Awards are officially presented by the ACL. The following two papers have respectively won the 1994 and 2009 ToT award:

• The 2019 winner of the 1994 Test-of-Time Award is:
  • Bernard Merialdo. Tagging English Text with a Probabilistic Model. Computational Linguistics 20(2), pp. 155–171
• The 2019 winner of the 2009 Test-of-Time Award is:
  • Theresa Wilson, Janyce Wiebe, Paul Hoffmann. Recognizing Contextual Polarity: An Exploration of Features for Phrase-Level Sentiment Analysis. Computational Linguistics 35(3), pp. 399–433

ACL Fellows

The ACL Nominating Committee has selected the following new fellows for 2019:

• Barbara Grosz
  • For foundational contributions to the computational study of discourse, including discourse structure, centering, and dialogue, as well as for service to ACL and related professional organizations, and energetic support of women in science.

• Graeme Hirst
  • For deep and influential work in numerous topics in NLP, Knowledge Representation, Linguistics, and related areas, as well as for sustained service of ACL as Treasurer and other positions, and for teaching and advising over many years.

• Mirella Lapata
  • For significant developments in methods to extract and represent domain knowledge to support machine and human learning, and for strong contributions to natural language generation.

• Hang Li
  • For foundational contributions in information retrieval, notably learning to rank, for strong contributions on deep learning and generation in dialogue, and for enabling the growth and commercialization of NLP in China.

• Paola Merlo
  • For pioneering research on the fundamental problem of verb predicate-argument structure and the automatic acquisition of the lexical, syntactic and lexical semantic properties of verbs, as well as for valuable service to ACL as editor of the CL journal.

• Michael Strube
  • For valuable contributions to the computational treatment of discourse, coreference, and evaluation, for sustained service to ACL in numerous roles, and for effective outreach to the public.

Congratulations to these established ACL members!

For more information about the ACL Fellows Program, please refer to https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Fellows_Program

ACL 2020

https://acl2020.org/

The 58th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will take place in Seattle, Washington at the Hyatt Regency Seattle in downtown Seattle from July 5th through July 10th, 2020.

Organizing Committee

• General Chair
  • Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University
• Program Chairs
  • Joyce Chai, University of Michigan
  • Natalie Schluter, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Joel Tetreault, Dataminr, USA
• Local Chairs
  • Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research
  • Priscilla Rasmussen, ACL
  • Luke Zettlemoyer, University of Washington

Important Dates

• Paper review rebuttal period: February 12 – 17, 2020
• Student Research Workshop Submission deadline: March 6, 2020
• Notification of acceptance (long & short papers): April 3, 2020
• Camera-ready papers due (long & short papers): April 24, 2020
• Proceedings publication: June 19, 2020
• Tutorials: July 5, 2020
• Main conference: July 6 – 8, 2020
• Workshops and Co-located conferences: July 9 – 10, 2020

EMNLP 2020

EMNLP 2020 will take place at Bavaro Convention Centre in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic from November 8th through November 12th, 2020.

Organizing Committee

• General Chair:
  • Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh, UK)
• Program Chairs:
  • Trevor Cohn (University of Melbourne, Australian);
  • Yulan He (University of Warwick, UK);
  • Yang Liu (Laix Inc. USA)

AACL-IJCNLP 2020

http://aacl2020.org/

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) in Suzhou, China from December 4th through December 7th, 2020.

Organizing Committee

• General Chair
  • Kam-Fai Wong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Program Co-Chairs
  • Kevin Knight, Didi Chuxing
  • Hua Wu, Baidu
• Local Arrangement Chair
  • Min Zhang, Soochow University

Important Dates

• Anonymity period begins: May 26, 2020
• Submission due (long & short): June 26, 2020
• Notification of acceptance: Sept 11, 2020
• Camera ready papers due: Sept 30, 2020

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The ACL-IJCNLP 2021 Conference will take place in Bangkok, Thailand.

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) hereby invites proposals to host the conference in the Europe/Middle East/Africa region in July or August 2022. At this time, we seek preliminary draft proposals from prospective bidders in the relevant regions. Promising bidders will be asked to provide additional information for the final selection.

Important dates:

• November, 2019: Final call for bids
• January 31, 2020: Notify intention to submit proposal
• March 15, 2020: Draft proposals due
• Through May 1, 2020: Feedback to bidders
• May 30, 2020: Final bids due
• July 5-10, 2020: Bid selected and site announced during ACL 2020

For any queries please contact Rada Mihalcea (mihalcea@umich.edu), the ACL2022 Coordinating Committee Chair, or Priscilla Rasmussen (acl.rasmussen@gmail.com).

Please send notifications and draft proposals to: Rada Mihalcea (mihalcea@umich.edu)

Read more: https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/reminder-call-bids-host-acl-2022

2019 Reports from ACL Officers

Q1 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q1_Reports

Q3 reports: http://aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q3_Reports

ACL Resolutions

The list of ACL resolutions: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Resolutions

Sincerely,

Shiqi Zhao, ACL secretary